The Los Angeles Times has announced its national edition will be shut down next week. The operation had already been pared down in March going from a full color broadsheet to a 24 page reduced format.

The New York Times comments that the "national edition has been an endangered species for years, kept alive as a way to give the newspaper's reporting a physical presence in Washington and New York."

The closure of the edition is a cost cutting excercise, as it was expensive to produce. After 85 newsroom jobs were recently eliminated at the paper, officials were forced to choose between closing down the national edition or eliminating two more newsroom jobs.

Officials at the paper have said that the national edition will not be such a great loss, since a lot of readers consulted it online anyway.

David Garcia, spokesman for the Times, said: "We've learned over the past year that most of our East Coast audience reads us on the Web." Consequently, the Times is planning to improve its website and "to highlight our Washington coverage, which we believe is the best in the country."

Source: The New York Times